2010 Internet - Time Machine Browser - theinternetfrom2010.com
2010 timeline+

January to December

The 2010 timeline

100 documented events. Featured events carry a red marker. Each one links to its sources.

January

20107 events
  1. PhonesVerified

    Google unveils the Nexus One

    Google announced its own Android phone, the HTC-built Nexus One, and sold it unlocked from a Google web store for $529, an attempt to bypass carriers that lasted only a few months.

  2. FeaturedSearchVerified

    Google announces "a new approach to China"

    Google revealed that it had been hit by a sophisticated attack from China (Operation Aurora) and said it was no longer willing to censor results on google.cn, setting up its withdrawal from the Chinese search market.

  3. PhonesSupported

    Haiti earthquake: text-to-donate raises tens of millions

    After the 12 January earthquake in Haiti, texting HAITI to 90999 gave $10 to the American Red Cross; the campaign raised more than $30 million and showed how mobile phones and social media could mobilise relief.

  4. VideoVerified

    YouTube launches an HTML5 video beta

    YouTube began offering an experimental HTML5 player that worked without Flash in Chrome and Safari, an early signal in the year's Flash-versus-HTML5 fight.

  5. BrowsersVerified

    Firefox 3.6 is released

    Mozilla shipped Firefox 3.6 with Personas skins, plugin-crash protection and faster JavaScript, the version most Firefox users ran through 2010.

  6. GamingVerified

    Mass Effect 2 is released

    BioWare's acclaimed space opera opened the year's run of major game releases and went on to win many game-of-the-year awards.

  7. FeaturedTechVerified

    Steve Jobs unveils the iPad

    At a San Francisco event, Apple introduced a 9.7-inch tablet starting at $499, mocked for its name and praised for its screen. It went on sale in April and sold almost 15 million units by the end of the year.

February

20106 events
  1. FeaturedCultureSupported

    Chatroulette goes viral

    The random-webcam site built by a Russian teenager exploded in February, reaching hundreds of thousands of daily users and becoming, per Google, the fastest-rising search of 2010.

  2. CultureVerified

    Old Spice posts "The Man Your Man Could Smell Like"

    The single-take Old Spice advert starring Isaiah Mustafa was posted to YouTube ahead of the Super Bowl and became the year's most-shared commercial, followed in July by a two-day blitz of personalised video replies.

  3. GamingSupported

    Robot Unicorn Attack is released

    Adult Swim released the rainbow-trailing Flash runner set to Erasure's Always, which became the browser game of the year.

  4. SocialVerified

    Google launches Google Buzz inside Gmail

    Google Buzz, a social feed built into Gmail, automatically followed people's frequent email contacts and exposed them publicly, causing a privacy backlash within days. It was shut down in 2011.

  5. SocialSupported

    Twitter reports 50 million tweets a day

    Twitter's blog reported that users were sending about 50 million tweets a day, up from 5,000 a day in 2007; by September the figure was around 90 million.

  6. MusicVerified

    iTunes Store passes 10 billion songs sold

    Apple announced the ten-billionth song download from the iTunes Store, cementing it as the world's largest music retailer in the last years before streaming.

March

20104 events
  1. VideoVerified

    OK Go's Rube Goldberg video is released

    OK Go released the single-take This Too Shall Pass video, a warehouse-sized machine synchronised to the song, one of the defining web videos of 2010.

  2. FeaturedSocialSupported

    Facebook passes Google as the most-visited US site for a week

    Hitwise reported that Facebook received more US visits than Google for the week ending 13 March 2010, the first time a site had beaten Google in its measurements for a full week.

  3. GamingVerified

    God of War III is released

    Sony's PlayStation 3 spectacle sold more than a million copies in its first week.

  4. FeaturedSearchVerified

    Google stops censoring in China and redirects to Hong Kong

    Google began redirecting google.cn users to its uncensored Hong Kong site, effectively leaving mainland China's search market to Baidu.

April

20109 events
  1. TechVerified

    The iPad goes on sale

    The Wi-Fi iPad reached US stores on 3 April and sold more than 300,000 units on its first day; the 3G model followed at the end of the month and international sales in May.

  2. SitesVerified

    WikiLeaks publishes the Collateral Murder video

    WikiLeaks released classified 2007 footage from a US helicopter attack in Baghdad that killed civilians and two Reuters staff, the first of the year's major leaks.

  3. PhonesVerified

    Apple previews iPhone OS 4 with multitasking

    Apple showed iPhone OS 4 (renamed iOS 4 in June) with multitasking, folders and iAd, and changed its developer rules to block apps built with cross-compilers such as Flash CS5's iPhone packager.

  4. SocialVerified

    Twitter launches Promoted Tweets and holds Chirp

    Twitter announced its first advertising product, Promoted Tweets, and at its Chirp developer conference reported 105 million registered users and 300,000 new sign-ups a day.

  5. SocialVerified

    The Library of Congress will archive every public tweet

    The Library of Congress announced a deal to receive Twitter's entire archive of public tweets since 2006, a sign of how seriously the medium was now taken.

  6. FeaturedPhonesSupported

    Gizmodo publishes the lost iPhone 4 prototype

    Gizmodo paid $5,000 for an iPhone prototype an Apple engineer left in a bar and published photos and a teardown two months before the launch; police later raided an editor's home.

  7. FeaturedSocialVerified

    Facebook launches the Open Graph and the Like button for the web

    At its f8 conference Facebook let any website add a Like button and share data through the Open Graph, spreading Facebook's blue thumb across the internet within weeks.

  8. PhonesVerified

    HP agrees to buy Palm for $1.2 billion

    HP acquired the struggling maker of the Pre and webOS, promising tablets and phones; it killed the hardware line 49 days after the TouchPad launched in 2011.

  9. FeaturedTechVerified

    Steve Jobs publishes "Thoughts on Flash"

    In an open letter Jobs explained why the iPhone and iPad would never run Adobe Flash, citing reliability, battery life and touch, and declared HTML5 the future of the mobile web.

May

20109 events
  1. GamingSupported

    Steam launches on the Mac

    Valve brought its Steam store to Mac OS X, gave away Portal for two weeks to celebrate, and introduced Steam Play so one purchase worked on both platforms.

  2. TechVerified

    Google admits Street View cars collected Wi-Fi data

    Google disclosed that its Street View cars had been recording payload data from unencrypted Wi-Fi networks, triggering investigations in a dozen countries.

  3. GamingVerified

    Red Dead Redemption is released

    Rockstar's western became one of the year's most acclaimed games and a frequent game-of-the-year pick.

  4. TechVerified

    Google I/O: Android 2.2, Google TV, WebM and the Font API

    At its developer conference Google announced Android 2.2 Froyo with Flash support, open-sourced the VP8 codec as WebM, previewed Google TV, and launched the Google Font API.

  5. FeaturedSearchVerified

    Google's playable Pac-Man doodle

    For Pac-Man's 30th anniversary Google replaced its logo with a playable version of the game, its first interactive doodle. It reportedly cost the world's workers millions of hours.

  6. TechVerified

    Bitcoin Pizza Day: 10,000 BTC for two pizzas

    Laszlo Hanyecz paid 10,000 bitcoins, then worth about $41, for two Papa John's pizzas, the first documented purchase of real goods with bitcoin.

  7. CultureSupported

    Lost airs its series finale

    About 13.5 million Americans watched The End, and the internet argued about it for weeks on forums, Twitter and recap blogs.

  8. TechVerified

    "Responsive Web Design" is published

    Ethan Marcotte's A List Apart article combined fluid grids, flexible images and media queries into a single approach and gave it a name that stuck.

  9. SocialSupported

    Facebook simplifies privacy settings after a backlash

    After weeks of criticism over confusing, increasingly public defaults, Mark Zuckerberg announced simpler privacy controls; a "Quit Facebook Day" on 31 May drew tens of thousands of pledges and little effect.

June

201012 events
  1. PhonesSupported

    AT&T ends unlimited data plans for new smartphone customers

    AT&T replaced its $30 unlimited iPhone data plan with 200 MB for $15 and 2 GB for $25, effective 7 June, the beginning of the end of unlimited mobile data in the US.

  2. PhonesVerified

    HTC Evo 4G launches on Sprint

    The first US phone marketed as 4G went on sale with a 4.3-inch screen and Sprint's WiMAX network, months before Verizon's LTE.

  3. FeaturedPhonesVerified

    Apple announces the iPhone 4 at WWDC

    Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone 4 with a Retina display, FaceTime and a glass-and-steel design; the Wi-Fi in the packed hall failed during the demo. It went on sale on 24 June and sold 1.7 million in three days.

  4. BrowsersVerified

    Safari 5 adds Reader and extensions

    Apple released Safari 5 with a Reader mode for articles, an extensions system and a faster JavaScript engine.

  5. TechSupported

    Adobe releases Flash Player 10.1

    Adobe shipped Flash Player 10.1 for desktops and, within weeks, Android 2.2 phones, with hardware video acceleration and touch support, while Apple's devices remained Flash-free.

  6. SocialSupported

    The World Cup sets Twitter records and summons the Fail Whale

    The FIFA World Cup in South Africa drove record tweet rates, including 3,283 tweets per second after Japan's goal against Denmark on 24 June, and repeated Twitter outages.

  7. GamingVerified

    E3 2010: Kinect, PlayStation Move and the Nintendo 3DS

    Microsoft named its motion camera Kinect, Sony dated PlayStation Move, and Nintendo revealed the glasses-free 3DS, the show's biggest surprise.

  8. TechVerified

    Microsoft Office 2010 goes on sale

    Office 2010 arrived with the Ribbon in every app and free Office Web Apps in the browser, Microsoft's answer to Google Docs.

  9. SitesSupported

    Quora opens to the public

    The question-and-answer site founded by two ex-Facebook engineers ended its invite-only beta, promising answers from people with first-hand knowledge.

  10. VideoSupported

    Hulu Plus launches

    Hulu introduced a $9.99 subscription with full seasons and apps for the iPhone and iPad, its first step from free ad-supported TV toward paid streaming.

  11. PhonesSupported

    Microsoft kills the Kin after 48 days

    Microsoft discontinued its teen-focused Kin phones less than two months after launch, one of the most abrupt product failures in the industry's history.

  12. GamingSupported

    Minecraft enters Alpha

    Markus Persson's Minecraft moved from Infdev to Alpha, sold from his website for about 10 euros, and began its word-of-mouth climb through forums and YouTube.

July

20108 events
  1. FeaturedVideoSupported

    Double Rainbow goes viral

    Jimmy Kimmel tweeted a January video of Paul Vasquez weeping at a double rainbow in Yosemite; within weeks it had millions of views, an Auto-Tuned remix and a Microsoft advert.

  2. CultureSupported

    Old Spice answers the internet with 186 personalised videos

    Over two days the Old Spice team filmed nearly 200 short video replies to questions from Twitter, Reddit and YouTube users, one of the most celebrated social-media marketing stunts ever.

  3. FeaturedPhonesVerified

    Antennagate: Apple's iPhone 4 press conference

    After weeks of reports that gripping the iPhone 4 dropped its signal, Steve Jobs held a press conference, insisted all phones had weak spots, and offered every buyer a free case.

  4. CultureVerified

    Inception is released

    Christopher Nolan's dream-heist film became the year's most-discussed movie online, spawning the BWONG trailer meme and endless ending debates.

  5. FeaturedSocialVerified

    Facebook reaches 500 million users

    Mark Zuckerberg announced that half a billion people were now using Facebook, launching a "Facebook Stories" site to mark the milestone.

  6. SitesVerified

    WikiLeaks publishes the Afghan War Diary

    More than 75,000 classified US military documents on the war in Afghanistan were published in coordination with The Guardian, The New York Times and Der Spiegel.

  7. GamingVerified

    StarCraft II: Wings of Liberty is released

    Blizzard's long-awaited sequel sold three million copies in a month and relaunched competitive real-time strategy and esports streaming.

  8. FeaturedVideoVerified

    The Bed Intruder Song is posted

    The Gregory Brothers Auto-Tuned Antoine Dodson's local-news interview into a song that became the most-watched YouTube video of the year and reached the Billboard Hot 100.

August

20106 events
  1. SitesVerified

    Google cancels Google Wave

    Fourteen months after its hyped debut, Google announced it would stop developing Wave, its real-time collaboration tool, because too few people used it.

  2. PhonesVerified

    Oracle sues Google over Java in Android

    Oracle filed a patent and copyright lawsuit over Android's use of Java APIs, beginning a case that reached the US Supreme Court in 2021.

  3. SocialVerified

    Facebook launches Places

    Facebook added location check-ins to its iPhone app and mobile site, taking direct aim at Foursquare and Gowalla.

  4. FeaturedSocialSupported

    Digg v4 launches and users revolt

    Digg's redesign removed favourite features and let publishers auto-submit stories; users flooded the front page with Reddit links, traffic collapsed, and founder Kevin Rose stepped down as CEO within weeks.

  5. TechSupported

    The $139 Kindle ships

    Amazon's third-generation Kindle, with a sharper E Ink screen and a Wi-Fi-only price of $139, became the company's fastest-selling Kindle.

  6. SitesSupported

    Gmail launches Priority Inbox and calls from Gmail

    In the last week of August Gmail added phone calls from the inbox and Priority Inbox, which automatically sorted important messages to the top.

September

20107 events
  1. MusicVerified

    Apple launches iTunes 10 with Ping, new iPods and the $99 Apple TV

    Apple's music event introduced Ping, a social network inside iTunes that flopped, a touchscreen iPod nano, an iPod touch with cameras, and a tiny second-generation Apple TV.

  2. FeaturedSearchVerified

    Google Instant shows results as you type

    Google began displaying search results before users finished typing, claiming it would save two to five seconds per search, and changed how people searched almost overnight.

  3. GamingVerified

    Halo: Reach earns $200 million on its first day

    Bungie's final Halo game had the biggest entertainment launch of the year until Black Ops two months later.

  4. SocialVerified

    Twitter unveils #NewTwitter

    Twitter's redesigned website added a second pane showing photos, videos and conversations beside the timeline, its biggest visual change to date.

  5. BrowsersVerified

    Internet Explorer 9 Beta is released

    Microsoft's IE9 beta brought hardware-accelerated graphics, HTML5 support and a minimal Chrome-like interface, but would not run on Windows XP.

  6. VideoVerified

    Netflix launches in Canada, its first market outside the US

    Netflix's streaming-only Canadian service at C$7.99 a month was its first international expansion and a template for the streaming-only plan it launched in the US in November.

  7. SitesVerified

    AOL buys TechCrunch

    AOL announced the acquisition of the Silicon Valley news site on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt, part of its push to become a content company.

October

201011 events
  1. FeaturedCultureVerified

    The Social Network opens in cinemas

    David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin's film about Facebook's founding opened to acclaim and fixed the popular image of Mark Zuckerberg months before Time named him Person of the Year.

  2. FeaturedSocialVerified

    Instagram launches on the iPhone

    Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger released a free app for square, filtered photos; it gained 25,000 users on its first day and a million by December.

  3. TechVerified

    Google reveals its self-driving car project

    Google disclosed that its modified Toyota Priuses had driven 140,000 miles on public roads with minimal human intervention, the first public word of the project that became Waymo.

  4. GamingSupported

    Angry Birds arrives free on Android

    Rovio released Angry Birds free with ads on Android; demand crashed the GetJar app store that hosted it, and the game passed 50 million total downloads by December.

  5. TechVerified

    Apple's "Back to the Mac": new MacBook Air and the Mac App Store

    Apple introduced 11-inch and 13-inch MacBook Airs with flash storage from $999, previewed Mac OS X Lion, and announced a Mac App Store that opened in January 2011.

  6. PhonesVerified

    Windows Phone 7 launches

    Microsoft's rebuilt mobile OS with its Metro live-tile interface reached Europe and Asia on 21 October and the United States on 8 November.

  7. SitesVerified

    WikiLeaks publishes the Iraq War Logs

    Nearly 400,000 US Army field reports from Iraq, the largest leak in US military history at the time, were published with partner newspapers.

  8. TechVerified

    Firesheep exposes session hijacking on open Wi-Fi

    A free Firefox extension let anyone on a shared network take over other users' Facebook and Twitter sessions with one click, pushing major sites toward HTTPS.

  9. FeaturedMusicVerified

    LimeWire is shut down by a federal court

    A permanent injunction won by the record labels forced LimeWire to disable its file-sharing software, ending the most popular P2P client of the MP3 era.

  10. SocialSupported

    MySpace relaunches as a "social entertainment" site

    MySpace unveiled a new logo and a redesign focused on music, film and TV, conceding the social-networking fight to Facebook.

  11. CultureSupported

    The Walking Dead premieres on AMC

    The zombie drama's Halloween debut drew 5.3 million viewers, a record for a cable series premiere, and launched a decade of live-tweeted Sunday nights.

November

20108 events
  1. FeaturedGamingVerified

    Kinect launches in North America

    Microsoft's controller-free camera for the Xbox 360 sold eight million units in 60 days and was hacked into open-source drivers within a week.

  2. BrowsersSupported

    RockMelt, the social browser, launches in beta

    Backed by Marc Andreessen, RockMelt put Facebook friends and feeds in the browser frame itself; it was bought and shut by Yahoo in 2013.

  3. GamingVerified

    Call of Duty: Black Ops sets a $360 million launch record

    Black Ops sold about 5.6 million copies in the US and UK in 24 hours, the biggest entertainment launch in history at the time.

  4. SocialVerified

    Facebook announces the new Messages with @facebook.com email

    Facebook unveiled a unified inbox combining chat, texts and email addresses, widely reported as a "Gmail killer"; it was not.

  5. MusicVerified

    The Beatles arrive on iTunes

    After years of negotiation, the Beatles catalogue went on sale on the iTunes Store, with Apple's homepage devoted to the band for the day.

  6. VideoVerified

    Netflix launches a $7.99 streaming-only plan in the US

    Netflix introduced its first US plan without DVDs and raised DVD-plan prices, signalling that streaming was now the main business.

  7. FeaturedSitesVerified

    Cablegate: WikiLeaks begins publishing US diplomatic cables

    WikiLeaks and five newspapers began releasing 251,287 US State Department cables. Within days Amazon, PayPal, Visa and MasterCard cut the site off, and its domain was dropped.

  8. SitesSupported

    Cyber Monday becomes the first billion-dollar online shopping day

    comScore reported US online spending of about $1.03 billion on 29 November 2010, the heaviest online shopping day recorded to that point.

December

201013 events
  1. CultureVerified

    "App" is named 2010 Word of the Year

    The American Dialect Society voted "app" its word of the year for 2010, beating "nom" and "junk"; the New Oxford American Dictionary had chosen "refudiate".

  2. GamingSupported

    Zynga launches CityVille

    CityVille reached 20 million monthly players within two weeks, the fastest-growing Facebook game yet.

  3. SitesSupported

    Groupon reportedly turns down Google's $6 billion offer

    The daily-deals company walked away from what would have been Google's largest acquisition and filed for its own IPO the following year.

  4. SocialSupported

    Tumblr goes down for about a day

    A database failure took Tumblr offline for roughly 24 hours, a sign of how fast the site had grown in 2010 and how many people now depended on it.

  5. PhonesVerified

    Verizon switches on its 4G LTE network

    Verizon launched LTE in 38 US cities for laptop modems, promising 5 to 12 Mbps; LTE phones followed in 2011.

  6. BrowsersVerified

    Google launches the Chrome Web Store and shows Chrome OS

    Google opened an app store for its browser, unveiled Chrome OS, and began shipping the unbranded Cr-48 notebook to testers.

  7. GamingVerified

    World of Warcraft: Cataclysm sells 3.3 million copies in a day

    Blizzard's third WoW expansion set a PC sales record weeks after the game hit 12 million subscribers.

  8. FeaturedCultureVerified

    Anonymous attacks PayPal, Visa and MasterCard for WikiLeaks

    In Operation Payback, Anonymous volunteers used the LOIC tool to knock the websites of companies that had cut off WikiLeaks offline for hours.

  9. FeaturedSocialVerified

    Time names Mark Zuckerberg Person of the Year

    Time chose the 26-year-old Facebook founder, noting that Julian Assange had won the magazine's readers' poll.

  10. SitesSupported

    A leaked Yahoo slide marks Delicious for "sunset"

    An internal Yahoo slide listing Delicious among services to be shut down leaked, prompting a mass export of bookmarks; Yahoo sold the site to AVOS the following year.

  11. PhonesVerified

    The Nexus S launches with Android 2.3 Gingerbread

    Google and Samsung's Nexus S was the first phone with Gingerbread and an NFC chip.

  12. GamingSupported

    Minecraft enters Beta

    Minecraft moved from Alpha to Beta on 20 December after selling hundreds of thousands of copies, with Mojang now a company of several employees.

  13. TechVerified

    The FCC adopts its Open Internet Order

    The Federal Communications Commission voted 3-2 for net-neutrality rules against blocking and unreasonable discrimination by fixed broadband providers, rules later struck down in court in 2014.

Done
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